Environment and Climate: Can Business Bridge The Gap?
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Banks & businesses are betting big on sustainable investments. Can they help politicians bridge the gap on climate change?
When Joe Biden talks about the challenge of fighting climate change, he mentions jobs: not green jobs or renewable energy jobs, but “millions of good paying union jobs.”
The new administration is working to reframe the conversation about the environment at a time when many of Wall Street’s largest banks and corporations are betting big on sustainable investments — from electric cars and trucks to new kinds of renewable and carbon-free energy.
On Let’s Find Common Ground, we interview journalists Stephanie Hanes and Mark Trumbull of The Christian Science Monitor, and learn the latest on the changing landscape in the great debate over the environment and climate. Can business help politicians from both major parties bridge some of their differences? Listen to find out.
Read the Episode Transcript
Ep. 30 – Environment and Climate: Can Business Bridge the Gap?
Stephanie Hanes
Stephanie Hanes is The Christian Science Monitor’s environment and climate change writer. After covering justice for both The Concord Monitor and The Baltimore Sun newspapers, she began writing for the Monitor as a correspondent from southern Africa in the mid 2000s. There, she took particular interest in the many intersections of development, conflict, conservation and culture. Her environmental reporting in Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe and elsewhere led to her book, White Man’s Game: Saving Animals, Rebuilding Eden and other Myths of Conservation in Africa (Henry Holt/Macmillan, 2017).
From the US, Hanes has written broadly on subjects ranging from climate and the environment to education, families, food and farming. She has been an Alicia Patterson fellow and a multiple-time grant recipient from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. She holds teaching positions at Yale University’s School of the Environment and The College of William & Mary.
Read more by Stephanie Hanes: Biden Wants to Tackle Climate Change. His Pitch is All About Jobs.
Mark Trumbull
Mark Trumbull is currently serving as The Christian Science Monitor’s economy and science editor. He has reported for the Monitor from both US coasts while maintaining ties to the Midwest where he grew up. Having majored in history during college, he’s aware that today’s linkages between economic and environmental sustainability echo age-old challenges that humans have faced before.
Mark’s reporting on climate change has included stories on shifts among Republican lawmakers, state governments, neighborhoods, and the business community. He has written about some of the “big ideas” for policy, like a carbon tax or carbon “dividends,” and the tension between environmental regulation and economic freedom. On a lighter note (or maybe heaviest of all) he’s explored how people with differing views can “talk turkey” constructively with one another – a step, perhaps, toward finding durable points of agreement.
